Points of Friction
were in some measure responsible for our Lancastrian fervour. They fed it with stories of high courage and the sorrows of princes. We wasted our sympathies on "a mere struggle for power"; but Hume's laconic verdict is not, and never can be, the measure of a child's solicitude. The lost cause fills him with pity, the cause which is saved by man's heroic sacrifice fires him to generous applause. The round world and the tale of those who have lived upon it are his legitimate inheritance.
Mr. Bagehot said, and said wisely after his wont, that if you catch an intelligent, uneducated man of thirty, and tell him about the battle of Marathon, he will calculate the chances, and estimate the results; but he will not really care. You cannot make the word "Marathon" sound in his ears as it sounded in the ears of Byron, to whom it had been sacred in boyhood. You cannot make the word "freedom" sound in un-
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